rose.blog

IBM magnetic core memory, 1958. This is one of many amazing pictures of historic computing machines you can find here.

Harvard in the fall is great. The place really has a unique feeling to it. Here it is.

I was recently visiting so that I could meet with some scientific collaborators there and to attend the teaching of the D-Wave case study at the business school.

Whenever I attend one of the case study analyses (the D-Wave case is part of the curriculum for MBAs at MIT-Sloan, HBS, Rotman, Michigan and a few other schools) I’m blown away by how quickly the students hone in on the real issues.

Coincidentally the focus of the discussion this time was how to architect “Big Science” projects properly, which was the subject of the SCE workshop keynote I posted yesterday.

One of the insights brought up during the class was that publicly funded “Big Science” projects have a very different participant selection algorithm than private efforts, and this may be the crux of why private big science works better. I am going to elaborate on this in a future post because I think it is counter intuitive but provides lessons for policy and management of big science.

Yesterday I had the honor of giving the keynote speech at the 15th Annual United States Workshop on Superconductive Electronics in beautiful Lakeville, Connecticut. Now I’m not allowed to say where Lakeville is but here is a picture, which may or may not be of Lakeville. If it even exists.

Here is a PG-13 version of the slides from the keynote.

Inspired by content at Doctor Recommended:

People hate on Hammer but he was a pioneer. Truly ahead of his time. Watching old Hammer videos made me think of Digital Underground’s line “you look like MC Hammer on crack, Humpty!” which naturally led me to this. Maybe it’s just because I have kids and am old enough to remember Digital Underground but I thought it was pretty funny.

Also I was routed to this story by a friend who probably fears my obsession with strong AI:
Scientists Abandon AI Project After Seeing The Matrix

My favorite line:

“I saw Revolutions with my 12-year-old son Eric,” Markovitch said. “He saw the look of worry on my face and said, ‘Dad, don’t be scared. It’s only make-believe.’ I had to tell him, ‘No, son, it’s what your father does for a living.’”

I have removed a series of comments on some recent posts. I apologize to the posters. In compensation for this removal I offer this. It is a high-level introduction to the computational model which we are working to embody. If you have a comment that has been removed, please read this.

If you have any questions about this computational model, comment away! If you have questions about Grover’s search or anything that’s not explicitly heuristic, I can try to answer but the question/answer are probably not directly relevant to the systems we’re building.

Faithful readers, here are some interesting links dredged up from the depths of the intarweb:

An interview with David Ditzel, processor guru (and ex-CEO of Transmeta). This is great stuff. Prepare to learn a lot about the business of processor development.

MOD front-man Billy Milano’s website. MOD’s seminal thrash crossover masterpiece USA for MOD remains one of the greatest musical epics ever. That’s right, EVER.

Here is a great source of useful information about graphs.

This is the greatest source of information about recovering from ACL surgery for fighters I’ve been able to locate.

That’s what my left knee looks like right now. Whatever.

This is an interesting blog about analyzing data generated by online games.

Here is the world’s best commercial.